Makeover Monday – Week 8, 2017: The European Potato Industry

Time for a European dataset once again. And if you’ve ever been around me eat breakfast, lunch or dinner time, you’ll know that I simply LOVE to eat. Potatoes feature right at the top of my list of all-time favourite vegetables. But in recent times people have shunned the humble potato for fear it will make fat (what???). So to ensure potatoes get a bit of love (it was Valentine’s Day only last week after all), this week is all about potatoes…

The original ‘viz’ comes from a Eurostat report, which contains a bunch of tables, pie charts and line charts. Our focus in particular is on these two beauties:

What I like about them:

they’re simple and everyone would know how to read them, looking at the intersection of the rows and columns to understand each value in its appropriate context

countries are listed in alphabetical order, which makes it easy to find specific ones the reader may be looking for

equally, years (in table 1) are in chronological order

having years on columns (table 1) makes sense for reading tables, rather than stacking them in a single column

The report clearly states all the data sources and provides links to them

What I don’t like about them:

no interactivity, tables don’t appeal to me visually, they don’t draw my attention and don’t make me want to look at this further

by shading each cell according to the value, this could have been easily turned into a highlight table which would be better than the uninspiring black and white data sheet

it’s very hard to compare countries over time and across metrics as I have to keep values in memory (i.e. in my brain) while searching for those values I want to compare them to, then calculate stuff and make sense of the results. A simple bar chart or line chart would help me a lot to better understand this dataset.

What I did:

first I needed some inspiration… I wanted a fresh colour palette to use for this week’s challenge so I wasted hours searched on Pinterest and stumbled across this beautiful photo by Chris Court Photography. Perfect!

so as a first step, I created my ‘French Fries and Ketchup’ palette for Tableau. It was fun 🙂

then I went back to pen and paper to draft some ideas for my dashboard and created my first version in Tableau. It was a pretty busy viz, mostly because I love the colour palette and wanted to use it to the max :-). I sent Andy a screenshot of the viz and got some rather frank feedback on my viz. And I’ll admit, it was a bad viz, because I just threw everything at it without thinking about what questions I wanted to answer.

so back I went to pen and paper once more and came up with a much simpler dashboard that provides an overview of the European Potato Industry in 2014…

having gone through the data for my first version certainly helped clarify what I wanted to show in my final dashboard so this paper version took about 5 minutes to create. After that I took a break to do some real life stuff in the outside world with other humans, it’s the weekend after all.

returning to my desk a couple of hours later I managed to create my final viz in about 50 min, formatting and all. Very happy with that and it confirms once more that a good draft gets you half-way there. At least!

So without further ado, here is my final viz… (click for the interactive version)